One of the keys to successful contract management is the ability to analyze old documents, discovering key insights and leveraging them to ultimately make smarter decisions in the future. For example, an unsuccessful business relationship with one organization may have resulted from oversights during the contract development phase, and that information can be used to ensure certain mistakes are not made again.
An article in the online publication Spend Matters suggests there are plenty of opportunities for organizations to improve their contract management strategies. Learning from past examples is one of the most effective ways to ensure success going forward, according to Peter Smith, the article's author.
"Another approach is to use past examples where effective contract management has paid off in the past and relate that to the current investment situation," he writes. "Whilst past performance is no guarantee of future performance, as our financial advisers will tell us, using "stories" to illustrate the effect of good supplier and contract management can be surprisingly powerful."
He goes on to say before finalizing new contracts, it's a good idea to find older comparable examples and determine which components of that particular contract worked and which didn't. Emulating tactics that saved money in a past contract could lead to similar results the next time around.
Of course, this is only attainable if businesses have the ability to quickly and easily find the information they are looking for in their contract repository. Using proper contract lifecycle management software can allow organizations to find what they are looking for and utilize that information to maximize the potential of their contract management initiatives.